Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu explained that Haas will be focusing on fixing tire degradation issues during pre-season testing in Bahrain.
Last year, the American team provided a few positive performances in qualifying, but everything fell apart during the race. The main issue of last season’s car was that the tire degradation was too high. That is something Komatsu wants to work on and improve.
“It’s not really so much comparing the differences across the specs, but if you look at our issue last year, it was clear that on Sunday we just couldn’t manage the tires for 300 kilometers,” said Komatsu. “So that’s what we’re focused on.
“Our Bahrain test program is completely focused on generating the relevant data so that our engineers can understand what’s happening to the car and what’s happening to the tires.
“Then we can decide, if we have good quality data, on the conclusion of how to improve it. Then we decide a different direction on that.”
Komatsu stepped in as the new team principal after negative performances in the last few years. However, the Japanese wants to keep his feet on the ground and believes that in the short-term, Haas won’t improve that much. The team’s focus is on the long-term.
“The short-term objective really is to make incremental improvements,” he said. “As I’ve said before, I believe we’ve got good ingredients, and we’ve got good people in the team, but we’ve really got to focus on the team being as one to make those improvements.
“Long-term obviously comes as a result of that, so for instance, our first ‘medium-term’ goal is to upgrade to a car that works, and that has happened before so I believe we can do it.”